Even your description of when it takes place is decidely biased against the process by choosing the word 'repeatedly'

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Actually Eddie it isn't my description or my definition or my anything as it's a direct quote from the Perceptual Learning web site which is why I asked if you agree with it ...
I'll add their description/definition of Perceptual Reading"Perceptual Reading introduces the children to the wonderful world of reading by exposing them to the text representation of spoken words that they are familiar with. Over an 18-month period they are exposed to and thus given the experience with text that will be invaluable to their reading career. By the end of the program your child will be able to confidently read children's books on his or her own. He/she will be able to sound out unfamiliar words."
Neither of which describe how my son "learnt" to read

Could a very weak score on the non-words test warrant further checks (e.g. for dyslexia)? Or would it simply mean extra phonics lessons? Or loads more practice at decoding non-words? Just wondering what action will be taken once the results are known. Thanks.

Actually Eddie it isn't my description or my definition or my anything as it's a direct quote from the Perceptual Learning web site which is why I asked if you agree with it
You have subtely changed the word 'defintion' which you used in your post to 'description' which you did not use in your post.
You quote what is obviously an advertisement from some commercial website as if it was an authoritative source. If you cannot tell the difference between a definition and a statement of when the proces takes place or the difference between a product advert and an authoritative source - then discussion becomes pointless.

Actually Eddie it isn't my description or <u>my definition</u> or my anything as it's a direct quote from the Perceptual Learning web site which is why I asked if you agree with it
You have subtely changed the word 'defintion' which you used in your post to 'description' which you did not use in your post.

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No Eddie I used your word "description" and my word "definition" ... did you miss it?
No Eddie I asked you if you agreed with the definition on this website ... nothing more nothing less ...you still haven't answered by the way.

I don't see SP as having all the trappings of a religion but I do see that some phonics fundamentalists appear to invest it with almost religious fanaticism and they. like all religious fundamentalists, frighten me. The damage that is done by anyone who believes that SP or any other single teaching strategy to the tens of thousands of children who leave school illiterate is inestimable.
Surely the annual Key Stage 2 English test resutls prove this to be a non-sense and the ongoing preference for using teachers as the scapegoats for this failure is the preferred escape route for all the shallow thinkers that preach a single 'one-size-fits-all' solution to what are almost certainly the most expensive illiterates in the world.

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There appears to be the implication that reading is learned in a different way to other pattern recognition methods. There seems to be a definite hostility to the idea that reading utilises our hunter gatherer pattern recognition skills implying that it has a more divine origin. The references to their "evidence" go against even the most basic science and the statistics are the fairly trivial social science kind.

The idea that you have to repeat the same thing over and over again seems rather religious too when it is clear that it isn't really how learning works. Your perceptual approach seems closer to the reality.

But I'm afraid that the people you are talking to are converts and without the doctrine they have nothing.

There appears to be the implication that reading is learned in a different way to other pattern recognition methods...

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Do I understand this aright?
In perceptual learning the unit is the whole word, whilst in ritual learning the unit is the syllable (or grapheme or whatever it is called)?
You learn words and string them together to make sense rather than learning bits of words, string them together to make whole words and then string the words together to make sense?

The idea that you have to repeat the same thing over and over again seems rather religious too when it is clear that it isn't really how learning works. Your perceptual approach seems closer to the reality. But I'm afraid that the people you are talking to are converts and without the doctrine they have nothing.
They do have one thing in common with all the followers of the 'true faith' that went before them and are now history - they have the capacity to keep us locked into a system that guarantees a 20% illiteracy rate.
I hadn't thought about that - like the catechisms or the ritual repititions of the Koran in the Madrassas When I went to school we were trained to repeat the times tables religiously in the belief that this was teaching us mathematics. Of course repeating mores of any system of beliefs over and over again saves you from having to think.
I think its fair to say that for many people, perceptual learning is a new idea - its not something covered in teacher training colleges - I had a contact from a lecturer in a teacher training college who asked my opinion about perceptual learning. There are no experts in perceptual learning in the UK and I hope there never will be. All learning is ultimately perceptual learning - we learn through what our senses perceive. If we acknowledge and exploit the brains' evolutionary pattern-seeking imperative we can offer an means of acquiring knowldege which is not ritaul. There is nothing new, exciting or magical about perceptual learning - it is not a new discovery - it is an ancient, evolutionary reality.
When a small number of children in a class with the same teacher and the same ritual lessons fail to acquire the pattern of relationships between graphemes and phonemes, it is not apostasy to try something else and since perceptual learning is an established proven strategy, it seems to make perfect sense that it should be tried.
I can understand teachers being sick of 'new ideas and fads' I can understand them being too jaded to try something different - I cannot for the life of me however, understand opposition to the idea particulary in a profession which routinely condemns one fifth of the population to illiteracy.
I think anyone following this thread will have read on another thread, the idea that illiterate parents also contribute to the illiteracy of their children. This arguement completely ignores the fact that it is our routine failure (mine included) that created, and is still committed to strategies that are creating) these illiterate parents. The one thing we do know about the illiteratti, is that their capacity for reproduction is not impaired by their inability to read.
I have explained my definition of 'perceptual learning' and I have no inclination to be tempted into silly semantic games about its definition. I was invited recently to give a talk on perceptual learning but I declined offering instead, a brief paper on PL - I will send it as an attachment to anyone who requests it eddiecarron@btconnect.com The very last thing I want is for a crop of perceptual leaning 'experts' to emerge sensing an opportunity to be in on the latest thing.

In perceptual learning the unit is the whole word, whilst in ritual learning the unit is the syllable (or grapheme or whatever it is called)?
I don't know whose statement this is but I couldn't resist responding. Perhaps I should have.
The basic unit in text is the grapheme (not perceptual learning) and the basic unit of sound in speech is the phoneme . Learning to read is about learning to match the appropriate grapheme with the appropriate phoneme. Anyone who wants to learn to read has to learn these correspondences. Anyone who can read has already learned these correspondences - they may not always know that they have learned them but they definitely have or they would not be able read.

SP is a ritual teaching strategy for teaching these correspondences to children. It is highly successful in that the vast majority of children can learn to read using this strategy. Phonics fundamentalists believe that (virtaully) ALL children can learn to read by SP - I disagree with that assuption. I believe that those children who fail to learn to read by SP can infact learn all of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences by a non-ritual route which is called perceptual learning and that they can do so in a single term. Perceptual learning does not and cannot have a 'basic unit' - it is an abstract concept - it is neither a decoding system nor a speech system.
While it absolutely is critical that the grapheme-phoneme correspondences are learned in order to be able to read - it is completely unimportant whether they are learned ritually or perceptually.

I believe that those children who fail to learn to read by SP can infact learn all of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences by a non-ritual route which is called perceptual learning and that they can do so in a single term.

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Surely to test that belief you need to begin with children who have had no other reading instruction or it will be impossible to determine if it is in fact perceptual learning that is responsible for improvement or previous learning

Surely to test that belief you need to begin with children who have had no other reading instruction. Not at all. You need to start with children who are unable to read - you need to have them complete a perceptual learning exercise daily and within a term, they will be able to read. Certainly, SP fundametalists will claim it was the SP that they had previously wot dun it. Well, good luck to them if they are that stupid. The main thing is that the children will become readers - they will lose the hangdog expression of failure which is a common feature of illiteracy. When SP first emerged, a couple of decades ago, it divided teachers into two groups. You had to be either a &lsquo;phonics person&rsquo; or &lsquo;whole word person.&rsquo; This was a very simple dichotomy which most teachers, being simple souls could grasp quite easily. Like all simple ideas however, it was a seriously flawed idea. We start to learn to read in a grapheme by grapheme sequence (phonics) but as we develop higher levelreadign skills, reading becomes orthographic &ndash; we recognise whole words without the need for grapheme by grapheme decoding &ndash; as in all skills acquisition, as a skill becomes practiced it also becomes a reflex reaction; in the case of reading, the sub-vocalisation of the word becomes a reflex reaction to the sight of the text.
Perceptual learning has nothing to do with &lsquo;whole words&rsquo; and everything to do with exploiting the brains pattern-seeking imperative.
Now,I am as computer programmer in fact use whole words in my crude attempt to present a reading situation which offers non-readers the opportunity to learn the grapheme-phoneme correspondences. In fact, in m year 2 intervention, a page of text is present to the child in soft focus &ndash; the computer says &ldquo;Watch every word and listen&rsquo; the programme then serially emboldens a word, pauses for one second and the enunciates the word. When the full page has been covered with the child passively experiencing the sight and sound of the word, the computer then invites the child to read the passage. This is effected by tapping the spacebar which emboldens the current word or touching any letter key which caused the word to be voiced. This duality offer the most important thing in reading &ndash; it causes a stream of meaning to flow uninterrupted from the page of text into the child&rsquo;s consciousness and within this experience, the brains pattern seeking imperative, &lsquo;learns&rsquo; the grapheme-phoneme correspondences intuitively. The child subsequently reads the passage to an adult from a printout with great success and it is this routinely successful experience which results in the child acquiring facility with the grapheme-phoneme correspondences.